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| "Veritasium" (YT) - "The Big Misconception About Electricity" ? |
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| adx:
--- Quote from: HuronKing on March 04, 2022, 06:58:14 pm --- --- Quote from: adx on March 04, 2022, 06:36:38 am ---Ok I think I accept Feynman's answer, that we can keep asking "why" ad nauseam after hearing "they do". But his appeal is not to something deep and mysterious, instead to something so shallow and readily apparent that it gets taken for granted. --- End quote --- I don't think that's quite what he is saying. He is saying that the underlying phenomena is so deep and mysterious that to truly understand it requires appealing to logic and analysis techniques that fall very far outside our ordinary, everyday intuition. --- End quote --- I thought something along similar lines at first, penning up that Feynman's reply basically boils down to "I don't know, but I know more than you and until you know as much as me you won't know as much as me." - which is 'feyn', of course. But it didn't fit with my next thought, saying the deeper phenomenon that is being questioned is actually the simplest, so I had to change. I think the interviewer asked the 'wrong' question; starting with the nature of a fundamental force is at the wrong end to ever be satisfied by a sequence of whys. It's not far off asking "I've got an electron in each hand, I bring them together and they repel - why?". I guess that's why Feynman initially looks a bit perturbed, then does an admirable job at lashing an answer together on the spot. In which case it is as much (I think more) about saying he doesn't know, than saying it is hard to understand or unintuitive. For all its mystery, gravity is readily apparent and gets taken for granted, I imagine it would have got a similar response if only for completeness. I think it's just that most people in this world will leave unsatisfied after having just learnt the ultimate truth (or something near it) of our physical world, if that truth is "don't know, it just does". So it needs dressing up (or down), to satisfy the human psyche. Gravity maybe less so, because someone is less likely to ask. But yes, there's no way he's going to be able to explain the "how" component of the question to an untrained audience in a few minutes - how it all interrelates and behaves to the limits of his understanding. --- Quote from: HuronKing on March 04, 2022, 06:58:14 pm ---"Magnets are magnetic because they're made up of lots of little magnets." ;D --- End quote --- That might do! --- Quote from: HuronKing on March 04, 2022, 06:58:14 pm ---... until one really dives into the experiments and mathematics that predict the phenomena (and having to ignore all the devices we use whose operation was engineered from the physics). ... --- End quote --- Generally agree, except the bit I put in italics. I have seen that argument pop up a few of times in the thread - that in essence electrical engineering and especially its advanced results (like iPhones) exist because of physics and academia. AFAIK the physics has usually lagged behind the industrial R&D, except in the early days when there was no commercial application, and a few notable examples (like radio, bad exapmle the iPhone then). Providing enormous support - but playing catch-up to empirical discoveries or very incomplete theories. My point there is if humanity were somehow limited in its ability to produce high-level physicists and mathematicians (which isn't too much of a stretch if one considers how unlikely that seems in the first place), then we'd still have self-aligning gate CMOS, it just wouldn't be 2nm. There is really little standing in the way of that Apple M1 Ultra MCM, given enough 'tinkering' - it's practically how the semiconductor industry advances anyway. Radio would have been discovered by now. I can get by without Maxwell's equations, and although I'd make a pretty poor RF designer, I still know what I'm doing enough to make things work well enough. --- Quote from: HuronKing on March 04, 2022, 06:58:14 pm ---You can make a picture that explains one aspect of the phenomena but the power of Maxwell's Eqs is that it is predictive of ALL (in the classical limit) electromagnetic phenomena. --- End quote --- I can't work out whether I agree or disagree. Which doesn't bode well for my point, which was something Maxwell-sounding but simpler to understand. If the speed of sound were fixed or you could have Cherenkov radiation in a vacuum, I'd tend to agree. |
| HuronKing:
Hey adx, I think we almost have a consensus viewpoint but I'd like to add some specific comments. :) --- Quote from: adx on March 10, 2022, 03:09:02 pm --- --- Quote from: HuronKing on March 04, 2022, 06:58:14 pm ---... until one really dives into the experiments and mathematics that predict the phenomena (and having to ignore all the devices we use whose operation was engineered from the physics). ... --- End quote --- Generally agree, except the bit I put in italics. I have seen that argument pop up a few of times in the thread - that in essence electrical engineering and especially its advanced results (like iPhones) exist because of physics and academia. AFAIK the physics has usually lagged behind the industrial R&D, except in the early days when there was no commercial application, and a few notable examples (like radio, bad exapmle the iPhone then). Providing enormous support - but playing catch-up to empirical discoveries or very incomplete theories. --- End quote --- There is a degree of 'leap-frogging' between experimentalists (sometimes this includes the engineers) and theoreticians. For example, we knew about the photoelectric effect before Einstein's paper on it. And some physicists (namely Planck) were already toying around with the idea of discrete quanta. But I'd make a strong argument that this singular statement by Einstein changed the world, --- Quote ---Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta localised at points in space, moving without dividing and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities. --- End quote --- Of course it wasn't immediately accepted - new experiments were needed to verify this interpretation. But, it predicted the effects of Compton Scattering. And this explanation of the photoelectric effect not only underpinned quantum mechanics (the basis for transistors) but also gave basis for the engineering of image sensors, phototelegraphy, etc etc. Your example of the iPhone is not an example of an advancement in physics. No new laws or phenomena were discovered or predicted by its creation. Quite the contrary - the iPhone is a culmination of the application of many diverse phenomena well-established and predicted by physics. Now, I will contrast this with the invention of fiber optic cables and the Nobel Prize that came with it because making fiber optics work involved the discovery of new physics of materials (the realization that signal attenuation was caused by material impurities and not by fundamental light scattering). In another thread on this forum I talked about another example of engineering leapfrogging with physics. Here is a portion of that comment reproduced here for your convenience: --- Quote ---In addition to once having Tesla on his payroll, Edison also hired physicist-engineers: Charles Steinmetz (discoverer of magnetic hysteresis and inventor of complex phasor analysis and most 'practical' tools we take for granted, seriously, this guy was incredible) Francis Upton (who has been called the Maxwell to Edison's Faraday, using physics to quantify Edison's experimental observations) Arthur Kennelly (also a contributor to complex numbers in transient analysis) John Ambrose Fleming (engineer who was personally instructed by Maxwell and made the equipment for the first transatlantic radio broadcast) Heaviside also consulted on Edison's work in his publications in The Electrician. The list goes on. And I'm really, really doing a terrible injustice to the accomplishments of these accomplished mathematicians and physicists by summarizing them so thusly. My point is that Tesla is correct. Edison with his 'practical' mind didn't know jackshit about how any of the inventions produced in his lab actually worked. He had an army of incredible physicists to explain how any of it worked and they were all masters of Maxwell's theory. And they all utterly changed our world. --- End quote --- And pointing this out doesn't take anything away from Edison or even Faraday who were both eminently accomplished experimentalists/engineers. But the advancement of human civilization comes from observing a phenomena, conceiving an explanation for it, and then seeing how far that explanation will take you - can you use it to predict new phenomena? And if that explanation fails to account for the new phenomena, get a better explanation! Build a new thing using that explanation... Rinse and repeat until you have an iPhone. 8) --- Quote ---My point there is if humanity were somehow limited in its ability to produce high-level physicists and mathematicians (which isn't too much of a stretch if one considers how unlikely that seems in the first place), then we'd still have self-aligning gate CMOS, it just wouldn't be 2nm. There is really little standing in the way of that Apple M1 Ultra MCM, given enough 'tinkering' - it's practically how the semiconductor industry advances anyway. Radio would have been discovered by now. I can get by without Maxwell's equations, and although I'd make a pretty poor RF designer, I still know what I'm doing enough to make things work well enough. --- End quote --- If Maxwell had been asked to improve communications... he would've just tried to build a better telegraph. No one in the 1860s could've conceived of a possibility to send wireless communications until Maxwell definitively proved the relationship between electric and magnetic phenomena. And the mathematics predicted a specific behavior - that radio waves could be emitted and received. How joyous for humanity that the prediction was correct. And extending the theory, Heaviside discovered that Poynting Vector and invented coaxial cables. Does EVERYONE need to use the intricacies of that theory all the time? No, of course not - we have developed special cases and formulas to make the physics applicable to a wide variety of situations without having to constantly rederive everything. But, we shouldn't then be upset when we're made aware of when our special tools and simplifications are not what's "really" going on (as Veritasium tried to do about energy propagation in classical theory, YMMV on if he did a good job). And even Maxwell's gorgeous theory has its classical limits - it doesn't accurately predict the photoelectric effect (Planck's Constant appears nowhere in Maxwell's Eqs). :) |
| SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: aetherist on March 10, 2022, 01:28:04 am --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 10, 2022, 12:24:19 am --- --- Quote from: aetherist on March 09, 2022, 09:25:26 pm --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 09, 2022, 06:30:15 pm ---So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets? --- End quote --- Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72. --- End quote --- Are you sure about that? :) --- End quote --- Yes. Even the modern vacuum mode Xs often pick up a weak signal, even tho the signal is supposed to be zero for vacuum mode. --- End quote --- I wonder if you're "affiliated" with this website in any way (or if you at least "endorse" its content): https://energywavetheory.com |
| TimFox:
Entering the 20th Century, there were several unexplained but demonstrated phenomena, including: 1. The "ultraviolet catastrophe" (q.v.) for black-body radiation, which motivated Planck's introduction of his famous constant. 2. The photoelectric effect. As mentioned above, not explained by Maxwell, but discussed by Einstein applying Planck's result. 3. The precession of Mercury's orbit. Once again, Einstein applied himself to this question. 4. The Michelson-Morley experiment, which some here have scoffed at. 5. Atomic structure. Classical statistical mechanics treated molecules as solid objects, but spectroscopy showed that there was structure. Bohr's early atomic model, using early quantum physics, was consistent with observed spectroscopy. 6. Radioactivity and x rays. etc. Note that the Maxwell equations survived this tumult, since they turned out to be consistent with Special Relativity. A good summary of the fin de siècle history: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.2016.pdf . However, physics has progressed in the last 120 years, as later scientists built upon the early work, and some results were modified (especially in the field of quantum mechanics, which replaced the earlier quantum theories). The validity of scientific theory is not based on its history, but experimental verification. |
| aetherist:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 10, 2022, 05:57:43 pm --- --- Quote from: aetherist on March 10, 2022, 01:28:04 am --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 10, 2022, 12:24:19 am --- --- Quote from: aetherist on March 09, 2022, 09:25:26 pm --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 09, 2022, 06:30:15 pm ---So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets? --- End quote --- Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72. --- End quote --- Are you sure about that? :) --- End quote --- Yes. Even the modern vacuum mode Xs often pick up a weak signal, even tho the signal is supposed to be zero for vacuum mode. --- End quote --- I wonder if you're "affiliated" with this website in any way (or if you at least "endorse" its content): https://energywavetheory.com --- End quote --- Energy Wave Theory (Equations), mainly by Yee. He has about 16 papers etc that explain. I haven’t seen any of that before. A quick comment. (1) Yee reckons that the neutrino might be the basic building block. I have said that the basic building block is the photon or the neutrino (a neutrino being a pair of photons sharing the same axis). So that is interesting. I wonder how he thort of that. I wonder whether he reckons that dark matter is made of confined neutrinos. Yee reckons that the neutrino is the smallest particle. (2) Yee duznt seem to mention aether. But he seems to invoke something pulsating in say 4 ways, giving energy waves, & the standing waves give us particles or something. Which is really just one of the many kinds of aether that one hears about. Everything is i reckon an excitation of the aether, plus (3) an annihilation of the aether, & (4) aether flows in. Yee mentions aether granules. (5) Duz Yee reckon that an electron is a confined photon. Yee reckons that photons are emitted by vibrating particles, eg vibrating electrons. Particles are standing waves created by inwards & outwards waves reflecting off a reflexion point (so reflexion points make particles). (6) What is gravity. I reckon that gravity is due to the acceleration of aether flowing into matter (see (3)&(4)). Yee says that gravity is due to particle spin which affects the longitudinal characteristic of inwards & outwards waves thusly creating an imbalance & a movement, ie a force. (7) What is electricity. Yee duznt mention anything like my electons. (8 )(9) Yee might have a clever theory re em radiation. Yee says lots here. But he reckons that radio waves are photons. No. (1) to (7) are the things that i need to look for to see if they accord with my ideas. (10) Yee seems to give a lot of thort to the relationship tween photons & electron orbitals. Which is at the top of my list of things that keep me awake at night. I reckon that photons orbit as photons, not as electrons. |
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